My company has a team of accessibility impacted testers who will assess any web/device work we do. It is invaluable and they can always find things that were missed regardless of how many tools we use to help in development.
It is revealing how people with disabilities are treated, just to walk on sidewalk as a deaf person. Most cyclicts assume they have a priority on sidewalks, and will ring bell to enforce it. If you do not jump out of their way in 2 seconds, you get rammed.
Cyclists know I can not hear them (I am wearing big noise cancelling headphones). Yet they still insist on their imaginary priority on sidewalks. I was forced to remove my noise cancelling headphones, just to hear their slurs!
Cyclists on bike have no priority, they are not allowed to cycle on sidewalks! They should be using roads! I am allowed to wear my noise cancelling headphones on sidewalk! I looked it up!
Sidewalks have to be usable by people who can't hear, people moving slowly, kids, older people etc. If a cyclist is on a sidewalk and can't safely pass without the pedestrian reacting instantly, they're the one creating the problem
We can't individual responsibility our way out of systemic problems. Cyclists on sidewalks generally signals terrible bike infrastructure.
There are people on bikes that ride like an asshole. There are people on cars that drive like an asshole. Both cause (different levels of) risk for pedestrians. There's only so much we can do about assholes, social ostracism works only so far and social change is much harder to accomplish than modifying our built environment to reduce or eliminate conflict points.
As an aside, I've noticed people get startled when I'm on my bike stopped but balancing on my bike while I wait for then to cross. I think some people intuitively model bikes on the same category as cars, so being anywhere close causes them to react as if a car hard crept close.
In my experience as a pedestrian, bikes are worse than cars. Less predictable, less observant of laws, and more willing to take risks that depend on others jumping out of their way.
In cycling threads you always have comments both telling cyclists to stay out of sidewalks and others telling cyclists that they "only* belong in sidewalks (and away from the road they drive in).
It is legal in some places, illegal in as many others, and has caveats almost everywhere (children are almost always allowed, in other places it is based on speed, etc.).
Generally it's more "overlooked" than allowed. In the UK for instance cycling on pavements (sidewalks) is unlawful but the guidance is to only enforce this if the cyclist is not giving consideration to pedestrians.
Realistically though I think it leads to the same state of play as everywhere else where pedestrians don't much fancy being hit by a faster moving and taller (if not larger) object so dodge out of the way even if they aren't necessarily obligated to.
Living in the USA, I always thought cycling on sidewalks was illegal, too, but looking it up, it seems that the laws vary from street to street, city to city, and state to state, which is ridiculous IMO.
Cyclists doing whatever they feel like is status quo everywhere. Now I'm most important sidewalk user! Now I'm a car! Now the traffic rules don't apply to me!
(Not all cyclists do this. But the rude ones are common enough that "cyclists" have gotten this reputation.)
This went from "deaf people should be allowd to function in society", which is absolutely fair, to "I don't want to take any responsibility for being aware of my surroundings", which is what wearing noise-cancelling headphones in public is. You can do that but you then share some of the blame when things go wrong. Saying "well, deaf people have to deal with this so it's not my fault" isn't the defence I think you think it is. Do I close my eyes and walk blindly in public there are blind people? No.
Accomodations are for people who need them not a shield for hyper-selfishness.
I cycle and I either don't wear any headphones or I use the open ones where I can still hear my surroundings. I assume every driver is eitehr an oblivious idiot or is out to kill me. I assume it's every pedestrian's first day on Earth because that's how it seems. The level of entitlement I see on a daily basis is insane. Runners who refuse to get out of dedicated bike lanes, people who park in dedicated bike lanes, people who get annoyed that I go onto the road when I'm allowed to, people that get annoyed that I go onto the sidewalk or road because I have to (often because the bike path is blocked), people who walk 5 abreast on a shared pedestrian bike path, etc etc etc.
But what really gets me is people who have elevated their own hyper-selfishness into some kind of virtue. "I'm going to block out all noise in a public space because that's what deaf people have to deal with" is a new one for me.
Oh and as an aside, people who are deaf often aren't completely deaf. Deafness (and blindness) is a spectrum.
"Accomodations are for people who need them not a shield for hyper-selfishness", namely people riding bicycles on sidewalks that are seen acting with an insane level entitlement while riding on dedicated walking lanes.
People act as people do regardless of their method of conveyance. A polite way of encountering a group walking where they should (and another should not ride) is to dismount the bicycle, say "excuse me" and walk through, then to remount and continue on the bike. In the case you mentioned, calling out in advance "excuse me, coming through" should just do it. If not, step up to bell ringing.
You should see what cyclists from Austin do on the Texas backroads, with their stopping in the middle of the lane at the top of a hill, doing the same on a tight curve, riding abreast... But again, people are people; they don't seem to realize road signs have a setback for a very good reason.
Not sure where you got the "I don't want to take any responsibility for being aware of my surroundings".
GP simply pointed out cyclists are apparently super unfriendly to deaf people, inferred from the experience where GP made himself temporarily deaf.
It doesn't matter whether GP takes responsibility or not. The issue is the social phenomenon where cyclists create danger for themselves and deaf pedestrians.
> I cycle
I know it's bad to stereotype people but you're not helping it.
TBH, the whole thing reads like a pretty off-topic rant, its a leap from 'accesibility to blind users' to 'treatment of people with disabilities' to 'cyclists being aggressive towards the poster, who is neither but wears noise-cancelling headphones'. I'm not sure if there's a productive discussion to be had around it.
Making sure you are fully aware of your surroundings is prudent, in case someone is acting recklessly or maliciously, but it shouldn't be a requirement.
You're not to blame at all when a cyclist runs you down on the pavement (that they shouldn't be on). Yes, you might have heard the bell without the headphones, but they're the one acting recklessly, and they're the one responsible for ensuring that they don't harm people acting normally.
There are all sorts of situations that it's possible to anticipate, but there's no moral fault ascribed for not acting defensively against every possible form of attack.
this sounds like a mess :') i am happy here in NL most people know the rules. occasionally you hear someone huffing and puffing about an oblivious tourist but thats about it. ofc there are anti social ppl still but the average is to know well the rules and follow them. it makes it so its pretty risk free in any mode of transport.
Only motorbikes is tough because people dont like them going past them in traffic jams :/ the last bastion of decency in our traffic xD... (lets forget about people who own racing bikes they dont count)
People have zero obligation to be able to hear their surroundings.
Listening to music on a walk is a perfectly acceptable thing to do. It’s very slightly less safe for them, but they aren’t risking other people so that’s fine.
That's simply not true and bad advice. This comes up in distracted driving cases. If you play music so loud that you can't hear your surroundings, you can become partially (or wholly) at fault for an accident [1]. I guarantee you there are situations where your intentional sensory deprivation will lead to legal liability so you have to be extra careful if you choose to do that.
You have an affirmative responsibility to act in a reasonable fashion to mitigate risks for yourself and others.
In distracted driving cases, you're behind the wheel of a vehicle that is capable of harming others; that's why it leads to legal liability. In situations where you are not likely to cause harm, "act[ing] in a reasonable fashion to mitigate risks for yourself and others" does not require anything from you.
All of this is really making my point. Being a pedestrian does not absolve you of all responsibility to mitigate harm. If you cycled at all you’d quickly learn just how entitled and oblivious so many pedestrians act.
Cyclists do stupid and dangerous things too. Believe me I am aware. I have to anticipate those too.
But, in my experience, nobody acts with more carelessness and selfishness than pedestrians. And I say that as one of them too.
> you’d quickly learn just how entitled and oblivious so many pedestrians act.
Well yes, they are indeed entitled to what they are doing. It is you who is acting entitled here - cyclists are not entitled to having pedestrians dodge them.
Your earlier vehicle example is wholly misplaced. Divers have a legal responsibility to maintain awareness of their surroundings at all times. Pedestrians do not have that. Notice that many disabilities can legally disqualify you from driving.
A pedestrian walking in a place where pedestrians are expected is not endangering cyclists. We're not talking about cycle lanes or crosswalks: we're talking about places where cyclists aren't supposed to be.
There is no requirement to mitigate all potential harms caused to unexpected hostile sources by the direct actions of unexpected hostile sources.
ride defensively, don't travel at high speed when you can see that there are pedestrians ahead who might very well turn and take a step into your lane. slowing down is not going to kill you, speed up when the way is clear.
> Where I had control, I made changes. Unnecessary labels removed. Accurate alt text added — not filed-in-for-compliance alt text, actually descriptive alt text. The heading structure was cleaned up where I could reach it. For this project's SharePoint tracking page, I rerouted entirely: instead of asking users to fight through the noise, the system now sends an email update at every stage of the approval.
seems to be the only bit of text that actually details anything that was done. I would liked to have read about the actual changes and steps taken to improve accessibility instead of some kind of low key rant about MS
Not to your critique, but from the quote, I’m alerted to the idea that filled-in-for-compliance is malicious compliance or non-compliance. I can’t imagine the frustration multiplier it must be. So much is frustrating enough on the intended mass-audience happy path.
Honestly the fact that this article still needs to be written in 2026 is the designated real-big-sad imho.
Screen readers almost entirely ignore the visual layer of any UI, and are entirely dependent on the layer that most developers ignore because it's not the visual layer. It's a perfect storm.
It stands to reason that someone who's actually used to using a screen reader should be brought in to verify what you've built actually works well for that target audience.
I'm a fully blind accessibility auditor, remediator and trainer myself, but I wouldn't dare to assume to know how a mobility-impaired user using eyegaze tech fares on a website I've audited.
My eyes don't gaze, so I don't have the context to make those calls.
On that note: I'm looking for work, anyone need me to tell them how their UI is bad for accessibility and fix it for them so they don't get sued later? :P
I'd like to connect with you offline for further conversation. I didn't see any contact information in your profile (and there's none currently in mine either).
The annoying and counterintuitive part of accessibility work is that there are some architectural decisions that are very hard to undo, don't seem that significant, but will absolutely bite you when you need to implement accessibility.
If you decide on a GUI framework which doesn't communicate semantics to the underlying APIs properly, you have no good options. Either you rewrite your entire project in a different framework just to deliver one feature, dive deep into framework guts to fix the issue (which may be written in an entirely different language and outside your area of expertise), or do some ugly hack on top to sort-of make it work.
A lot of accessibility issues, especially historically, essentially boiled down to "developer chose the wrong approach and didn't know how to get themselves out of the situation later."
It's better now because we went from desktop frameworks drawing their own pixels on screen to web frameworks creating div soup, and div soup is much easier to fix than having pixels instead of native OS controls, but it still happens occasionally. The most recent one I personally ran into was WindScribe, who made a desktop GUI framework of their own for no good reason, and now they can't fix accessibility without a whole lot of work.
The solution, that accessibility advocates have been clamoring for for decades now, is to s"shift left".
If you know you're going to add accessibility, which ... we have had WCAG since 2005, not knowing that at this point is negligence imho, just make sure you work with frameworks and libraries that won't require overhauling all the things when the PO or management finally get sued into letting devs actually implement it properly. If that kind of functionality takes a backseat to "stunning" and "beaituful" designs that a bunch of people can't use, we take the user out of user interface.
We should stop thinking about accessibility as if it's some kind of feature that you "add" into the product later in development. This "add it later" mentality doesn't work for security, and it definitely doesn't work for accessibility. Like security, accessibility should be baked into the product's design from the very beginning. It should be part of the product's basic requirements.
The web has its own problems, but at least bad HTML is often still visible enough to repair. A custom canvas-like desktop UI can be basically a black box to assistive tech
The "invisible" point is interesting, although I'm not sure I'd read too much into it. Visual metaphors are so baked into English that avoiding all of them can start to feel a bit performative unless the wording is actually excluding someone
I always find it interesting to see that while we watch people struggle to get through a UI , unable to see the forest through the trees while they just want to get done with the task they, when they eyeball it, should only take five minutes but takes five hours instead, we get blinded by talking about the use of the word blindspot or the order in which we should say visual, impairment and person. meanwhile the UI never gets fixed and the cycle repeats when the next person shows up. As a blind person myself, I truly don't see the problem with using visual terminology given we don't live in a value, and while I understand some people go looking for a fight after the 30th inaccessible mandatory form they have to fill out that day, I've always preferred a more measured approach.
Revealing that, after 30 years of Internet, someone's actually confronting this situation for the first time. So's the word 'gaps' ... as if the English Channel is a 'gap' for swimmers.
Equally revealing is the audio quality of most CPU screen-readers (regardless of platform). Usually, not far from the crappy first attempts of 30 years ago.
The "read only" example is such a good illustration of how accessibility problems often aren't one big broken thing, but a bunch of tiny reasonable-seeming decisions stacked together
So many things are like that. Trying to bolt on accessibility or security as an afterthought never work as well as making those things part of the initial design.
I've been at this long enough that yes I know that just getting something out the door so we can make money is important.
But this just creates another kind of technical debt that comes back to bite you.
While the content was interesting, the AI-slop-stench was repelling.
Talking about AI (sorry!), perhaps an AI assisted screen reader could remove repetitive elements (it appends "(read only)" to every. single. field.) in a smart fashion? Does this already exist?
We're seeing AI being used to improve a11y in quite a few places: (Live) transcripts for video conferences, image to text (VQA, visual question answering) etc.
No. There are certainly AI-generated accessibility solutions for single, existing applications, games and websites but no outright AI-powered screen reader. I'd think the token cost alone would make such a project prohibitively expensive, although one-off AI features are starting to sneak into JAWS and NVDA as we spaek, so who knows.
In general you WANNA see any people using your app.
Read an "accessibility" spec or a requirement or a UX "good practice" is not a substitute for see how people use it!
One of my anecdotes from back in the day: The secretary of a school that use the app I help develop call about problems reading data, that comes in CD. We can't do much by phone so I travel to the town to try to debug on site (bring dev tools in the day where that means diskettes and cds, we were transitioning from FoxPro 2.6 DOS to Visual Fox Windows 95).
Eventually after some time the secretary put the coffee cup in the CD tray.
My company has a team of accessibility impacted testers who will assess any web/device work we do. It is invaluable and they can always find things that were missed regardless of how many tools we use to help in development.
It is revealing how people with disabilities are treated, just to walk on sidewalk as a deaf person. Most cyclicts assume they have a priority on sidewalks, and will ring bell to enforce it. If you do not jump out of their way in 2 seconds, you get rammed.
Cyclists know I can not hear them (I am wearing big noise cancelling headphones). Yet they still insist on their imaginary priority on sidewalks. I was forced to remove my noise cancelling headphones, just to hear their slurs!
Cyclists on bike have no priority, they are not allowed to cycle on sidewalks! They should be using roads! I am allowed to wear my noise cancelling headphones on sidewalk! I looked it up!
Sidewalks have to be usable by people who can't hear, people moving slowly, kids, older people etc. If a cyclist is on a sidewalk and can't safely pass without the pedestrian reacting instantly, they're the one creating the problem
We can't individual responsibility our way out of systemic problems. Cyclists on sidewalks generally signals terrible bike infrastructure.
There are people on bikes that ride like an asshole. There are people on cars that drive like an asshole. Both cause (different levels of) risk for pedestrians. There's only so much we can do about assholes, social ostracism works only so far and social change is much harder to accomplish than modifying our built environment to reduce or eliminate conflict points.
As an aside, I've noticed people get startled when I'm on my bike stopped but balancing on my bike while I wait for then to cross. I think some people intuitively model bikes on the same category as cars, so being anywhere close causes them to react as if a car hard crept close.
Thanks for stopping.
In my experience as a pedestrian, bikes are worse than cars. Less predictable, less observant of laws, and more willing to take risks that depend on others jumping out of their way.
On the plus side, they don’t weigh 3000lbs.
> Cyclists on sidewalks generally signals
It signals yet another asshole. No need for some complicated justifications! 90% of infrastructure is already dedicated to bikes, it is called roads!
> modifying our built environment to reduce or eliminate conflict points.
How about repression and fines? Works on cars!
> startled when I'm on my bike stopped but balancing on my bike
Perhaps people just do not want to be around dangerous situations? If you fall and break something, they will have to help you.
And cyclists sometimes get angry and aggressive, when falling near pedestrians.
Cycling on sidewalks is illegal here in Canada. Surprised it's being allowed elsewhere
In cycling threads you always have comments both telling cyclists to stay out of sidewalks and others telling cyclists that they "only* belong in sidewalks (and away from the road they drive in).
It is legal in some places, illegal in as many others, and has caveats almost everywhere (children are almost always allowed, in other places it is based on speed, etc.).
Generally it's more "overlooked" than allowed. In the UK for instance cycling on pavements (sidewalks) is unlawful but the guidance is to only enforce this if the cyclist is not giving consideration to pedestrians.
Realistically though I think it leads to the same state of play as everywhere else where pedestrians don't much fancy being hit by a faster moving and taller (if not larger) object so dodge out of the way even if they aren't necessarily obligated to.
Living in the USA, I always thought cycling on sidewalks was illegal, too, but looking it up, it seems that the laws vary from street to street, city to city, and state to state, which is ridiculous IMO.
In my part of Canada it's illegal and allowed.
A pedestrian has priority on the road, that doesn't mean you should walk into the road with your eyes closed wearing noise cancelling headphones.
is this a netherlands post? because normal countries dont assume human on bike IS the default
Cyclists doing whatever they feel like is status quo everywhere. Now I'm most important sidewalk user! Now I'm a car! Now the traffic rules don't apply to me!
(Not all cyclists do this. But the rude ones are common enough that "cyclists" have gotten this reputation.)
and then you ride in the street and drivers yell "get on the sidewalk" and try to hit you.
That isn’t the fault of the sidewalk users, don’t make it their problem.
This went from "deaf people should be allowd to function in society", which is absolutely fair, to "I don't want to take any responsibility for being aware of my surroundings", which is what wearing noise-cancelling headphones in public is. You can do that but you then share some of the blame when things go wrong. Saying "well, deaf people have to deal with this so it's not my fault" isn't the defence I think you think it is. Do I close my eyes and walk blindly in public there are blind people? No.
Accomodations are for people who need them not a shield for hyper-selfishness.
I cycle and I either don't wear any headphones or I use the open ones where I can still hear my surroundings. I assume every driver is eitehr an oblivious idiot or is out to kill me. I assume it's every pedestrian's first day on Earth because that's how it seems. The level of entitlement I see on a daily basis is insane. Runners who refuse to get out of dedicated bike lanes, people who park in dedicated bike lanes, people who get annoyed that I go onto the road when I'm allowed to, people that get annoyed that I go onto the sidewalk or road because I have to (often because the bike path is blocked), people who walk 5 abreast on a shared pedestrian bike path, etc etc etc.
But what really gets me is people who have elevated their own hyper-selfishness into some kind of virtue. "I'm going to block out all noise in a public space because that's what deaf people have to deal with" is a new one for me.
Oh and as an aside, people who are deaf often aren't completely deaf. Deafness (and blindness) is a spectrum.
"Accomodations are for people who need them not a shield for hyper-selfishness", namely people riding bicycles on sidewalks that are seen acting with an insane level entitlement while riding on dedicated walking lanes.
People act as people do regardless of their method of conveyance. A polite way of encountering a group walking where they should (and another should not ride) is to dismount the bicycle, say "excuse me" and walk through, then to remount and continue on the bike. In the case you mentioned, calling out in advance "excuse me, coming through" should just do it. If not, step up to bell ringing.
You should see what cyclists from Austin do on the Texas backroads, with their stopping in the middle of the lane at the top of a hill, doing the same on a tight curve, riding abreast... But again, people are people; they don't seem to realize road signs have a setback for a very good reason.
Not sure where you got the "I don't want to take any responsibility for being aware of my surroundings".
GP simply pointed out cyclists are apparently super unfriendly to deaf people, inferred from the experience where GP made himself temporarily deaf.
It doesn't matter whether GP takes responsibility or not. The issue is the social phenomenon where cyclists create danger for themselves and deaf pedestrians.
> I cycle
I know it's bad to stereotype people but you're not helping it.
TBH, the whole thing reads like a pretty off-topic rant, its a leap from 'accesibility to blind users' to 'treatment of people with disabilities' to 'cyclists being aggressive towards the poster, who is neither but wears noise-cancelling headphones'. I'm not sure if there's a productive discussion to be had around it.
Making sure you are fully aware of your surroundings is prudent, in case someone is acting recklessly or maliciously, but it shouldn't be a requirement.
You're not to blame at all when a cyclist runs you down on the pavement (that they shouldn't be on). Yes, you might have heard the bell without the headphones, but they're the one acting recklessly, and they're the one responsible for ensuring that they don't harm people acting normally.
There are all sorts of situations that it's possible to anticipate, but there's no moral fault ascribed for not acting defensively against every possible form of attack.
this sounds like a mess :') i am happy here in NL most people know the rules. occasionally you hear someone huffing and puffing about an oblivious tourist but thats about it. ofc there are anti social ppl still but the average is to know well the rules and follow them. it makes it so its pretty risk free in any mode of transport.
Only motorbikes is tough because people dont like them going past them in traffic jams :/ the last bastion of decency in our traffic xD... (lets forget about people who own racing bikes they dont count)
People have zero obligation to be able to hear their surroundings.
Listening to music on a walk is a perfectly acceptable thing to do. It’s very slightly less safe for them, but they aren’t risking other people so that’s fine.
That's simply not true and bad advice. This comes up in distracted driving cases. If you play music so loud that you can't hear your surroundings, you can become partially (or wholly) at fault for an accident [1]. I guarantee you there are situations where your intentional sensory deprivation will lead to legal liability so you have to be extra careful if you choose to do that.
You have an affirmative responsibility to act in a reasonable fashion to mitigate risks for yourself and others.
[1]: https://naqvilaw.com/las-vegas-impaired-driving-attorney/lou...
In distracted driving cases, you're behind the wheel of a vehicle that is capable of harming others; that's why it leads to legal liability. In situations where you are not likely to cause harm, "act[ing] in a reasonable fashion to mitigate risks for yourself and others" does not require anything from you.
All of this is really making my point. Being a pedestrian does not absolve you of all responsibility to mitigate harm. If you cycled at all you’d quickly learn just how entitled and oblivious so many pedestrians act.
Cyclists do stupid and dangerous things too. Believe me I am aware. I have to anticipate those too.
But, in my experience, nobody acts with more carelessness and selfishness than pedestrians. And I say that as one of them too.
> you’d quickly learn just how entitled and oblivious so many pedestrians act.
Well yes, they are indeed entitled to what they are doing. It is you who is acting entitled here - cyclists are not entitled to having pedestrians dodge them.
Your earlier vehicle example is wholly misplaced. Divers have a legal responsibility to maintain awareness of their surroundings at all times. Pedestrians do not have that. Notice that many disabilities can legally disqualify you from driving.
A pedestrian walking in a place where pedestrians are expected is not endangering cyclists. We're not talking about cycle lanes or crosswalks: we're talking about places where cyclists aren't supposed to be.
There is no requirement to mitigate all potential harms caused to unexpected hostile sources by the direct actions of unexpected hostile sources.
With greater powers come greater responsibilities.
ride defensively, don't travel at high speed when you can see that there are pedestrians ahead who might very well turn and take a step into your lane. slowing down is not going to kill you, speed up when the way is clear.
You seem to be misunderstanding the difference between what someone driving a car is responsible for vs. a pedestrian.
> Where I had control, I made changes. Unnecessary labels removed. Accurate alt text added — not filed-in-for-compliance alt text, actually descriptive alt text. The heading structure was cleaned up where I could reach it. For this project's SharePoint tracking page, I rerouted entirely: instead of asking users to fight through the noise, the system now sends an email update at every stage of the approval.
seems to be the only bit of text that actually details anything that was done. I would liked to have read about the actual changes and steps taken to improve accessibility instead of some kind of low key rant about MS
Not to your critique, but from the quote, I’m alerted to the idea that filled-in-for-compliance is malicious compliance or non-compliance. I can’t imagine the frustration multiplier it must be. So much is frustrating enough on the intended mass-audience happy path.
Honestly the fact that this article still needs to be written in 2026 is the designated real-big-sad imho.
Screen readers almost entirely ignore the visual layer of any UI, and are entirely dependent on the layer that most developers ignore because it's not the visual layer. It's a perfect storm.
It stands to reason that someone who's actually used to using a screen reader should be brought in to verify what you've built actually works well for that target audience.
I'm a fully blind accessibility auditor, remediator and trainer myself, but I wouldn't dare to assume to know how a mobility-impaired user using eyegaze tech fares on a website I've audited.
My eyes don't gaze, so I don't have the context to make those calls.
On that note: I'm looking for work, anyone need me to tell them how their UI is bad for accessibility and fix it for them so they don't get sued later? :P
I'd like to connect with you offline for further conversation. I didn't see any contact information in your profile (and there's none currently in mine either).
The annoying and counterintuitive part of accessibility work is that there are some architectural decisions that are very hard to undo, don't seem that significant, but will absolutely bite you when you need to implement accessibility.
If you decide on a GUI framework which doesn't communicate semantics to the underlying APIs properly, you have no good options. Either you rewrite your entire project in a different framework just to deliver one feature, dive deep into framework guts to fix the issue (which may be written in an entirely different language and outside your area of expertise), or do some ugly hack on top to sort-of make it work.
A lot of accessibility issues, especially historically, essentially boiled down to "developer chose the wrong approach and didn't know how to get themselves out of the situation later."
It's better now because we went from desktop frameworks drawing their own pixels on screen to web frameworks creating div soup, and div soup is much easier to fix than having pixels instead of native OS controls, but it still happens occasionally. The most recent one I personally ran into was WindScribe, who made a desktop GUI framework of their own for no good reason, and now they can't fix accessibility without a whole lot of work.
The solution, that accessibility advocates have been clamoring for for decades now, is to s"shift left".
If you know you're going to add accessibility, which ... we have had WCAG since 2005, not knowing that at this point is negligence imho, just make sure you work with frameworks and libraries that won't require overhauling all the things when the PO or management finally get sued into letting devs actually implement it properly. If that kind of functionality takes a backseat to "stunning" and "beaituful" designs that a bunch of people can't use, we take the user out of user interface.
We should stop thinking about accessibility as if it's some kind of feature that you "add" into the product later in development. This "add it later" mentality doesn't work for security, and it definitely doesn't work for accessibility. Like security, accessibility should be baked into the product's design from the very beginning. It should be part of the product's basic requirements.
The web has its own problems, but at least bad HTML is often still visible enough to repair. A custom canvas-like desktop UI can be basically a black box to assistive tech
> revealed invisible
Interesting that the language of sight is so prevalent that it appears in this very title twice.
Echoing other comments, this would be a stronger article if it went into more specifics, but the AI voice precludes that meaningfully.
The "invisible" point is interesting, although I'm not sure I'd read too much into it. Visual metaphors are so baked into English that avoiding all of them can start to feel a bit performative unless the wording is actually excluding someone
> Visual metaphors are so baked into English
This is the point I am making.
I thought of it as a pun
> Interesting that the language of sight is so prevalent that it appears in this very title twice.
Well, it appears once in "invisible", and once in "blind"... but I don't see why "blind" is a surprise when talking about someone blind.
There is no reference to sight in "reveal".
Not an immediately explicit one, but to reveal is to unveil [1] is to remove a covering that blocks sight specifically.
[1] https://www.etymonline.com/word/reveal
I always find it interesting to see that while we watch people struggle to get through a UI , unable to see the forest through the trees while they just want to get done with the task they, when they eyeball it, should only take five minutes but takes five hours instead, we get blinded by talking about the use of the word blindspot or the order in which we should say visual, impairment and person. meanwhile the UI never gets fixed and the cycle repeats when the next person shows up. As a blind person myself, I truly don't see the problem with using visual terminology given we don't live in a value, and while I understand some people go looking for a fight after the 30th inaccessible mandatory form they have to fill out that day, I've always preferred a more measured approach.
The language isn't even being criticized here, just remarked upon. I think that's fair.
Yeah, blind seems unavoidable there, since it's literally about a blind client
Revealing that, after 30 years of Internet, someone's actually confronting this situation for the first time. So's the word 'gaps' ... as if the English Channel is a 'gap' for swimmers.
Equally revealing is the audio quality of most CPU screen-readers (regardless of platform). Usually, not far from the crappy first attempts of 30 years ago.
But then, hey, it's a small market, right?
The "read only" example is such a good illustration of how accessibility problems often aren't one big broken thing, but a bunch of tiny reasonable-seeming decisions stacked together
So many things are like that. Trying to bolt on accessibility or security as an afterthought never work as well as making those things part of the initial design.
I've been at this long enough that yes I know that just getting something out the door so we can make money is important.
But this just creates another kind of technical debt that comes back to bite you.
While the content was interesting, the AI-slop-stench was repelling.
Talking about AI (sorry!), perhaps an AI assisted screen reader could remove repetitive elements (it appends "(read only)" to every. single. field.) in a smart fashion? Does this already exist?
We're seeing AI being used to improve a11y in quite a few places: (Live) transcripts for video conferences, image to text (VQA, visual question answering) etc.
No. There are certainly AI-generated accessibility solutions for single, existing applications, games and websites but no outright AI-powered screen reader. I'd think the token cost alone would make such a project prohibitively expensive, although one-off AI features are starting to sneak into JAWS and NVDA as we spaek, so who knows.
It's not as though the task requires a frontier size LLM. A small on device model should suffice for most clean up.
But if you did want to run a full size model deepseek v4 flash is so cheap that I doubt even many hours of web browsing would have a noticeable cost.
Note the irony in the title.
> It took 18 hours of work.
So a couple of days plus a few hours. Seems reasonable.
Originally expected to take 2 hours. I think the writer is just saying it was a lot more than expected.
In general you WANNA see any people using your app.
Read an "accessibility" spec or a requirement or a UX "good practice" is not a substitute for see how people use it!
One of my anecdotes from back in the day: The secretary of a school that use the app I help develop call about problems reading data, that comes in CD. We can't do much by phone so I travel to the town to try to debug on site (bring dev tools in the day where that means diskettes and cds, we were transitioning from FoxPro 2.6 DOS to Visual Fox Windows 95).
Eventually after some time the secretary put the coffee cup in the CD tray.
Go figure!